Reached

are so tired,” the woman says. “I need green tablets, as many as this will purchase.” She holds out a ring with a red stone in it. How and where did she find it? I’m not supposed to ask. But if it’s authentic, it will be worth something. “He’s afraid. We don’t know what else to do.”
    I take the ring. We’ve seen more and more of this, since the Rising took away the tablets and containers the Society gave us. Though I’m glad to see the red and the blue tablets gone, I know there are people who need the green and who are having a hard time going without. Even my mother needed it once.
    I think of her, bending over my bed when I couldn’t sleep, and it sends an ache through me and reminds me of how she used to lull me to sleep with the descriptions of flowers.
“Queen Anne’s lace,”
she’d say, in a slow, soft voice.
“Wild carrot. You can eat the root when it’s young enough. The flower is white and lacy. Lovely. Like stars
.
”
    Once, the Society sent her out to see flowers in other Provinces. They wanted her to look at rogue crops that they thought people might be using for food, as part of a rebellion. My mother told me how in Grandia Province there was an entire field of Queen Anne’s lace, and how, in another Province, she saw a field of a different white flower, even more beautiful. My mother talked to the growers who’d cultivated the fields. She saw the fear of discovery in their eyes, but she did her job and reported them to the Society because she wanted to keep my family safe. The Society let her remember what she’d done. They didn’t take
that
memory.
    My mother spent her life growing things. Could the red garden day memory Grandfather talked about have something to do with her?
    The spring breeze cuts around me, tearing the last of the old leaves from the branches of the bushes. It pulls on my clothes, and I imagine that if it took them from me, the last of my papers would soar out into the world, and I know it is time for me to stop holding certain things so close.
    The woman has turned to look in the direction of the lake, that long stretch of water glinting in the sun.
    Water, river, stone, sun.
    Perhaps that is what Ky’s mother would have sung to him as she painted on the rocks in the Outer Provinces.
    I press the ring back into the woman’s hand. “Don’t give him the tablets,” I say. “Not yet. You can sing to him. Try that first.”
    “What?” she asks, looking at me in genuine surprise.
    “You could sing to him,” I say again. “It might work.”
    And then her eyes open a little wider. “I could,” she says. “I have music in me. I always have.” Her voice sounds almost fierce. “But what
words
would I sing?”
    What would Hunter, back in the farmers’ settlement, have sung to his child, Sarah, who died? She believed in things that he did not. So what would he have said that could bridge the gap between belief and unbelief?
    What would Ky sing? I think of all the places we’ve been together, all the things we’ve seen:
     
    Wind over hill, and under tree.
    Past the border no one can see.
     
    I wonder, standing there with the mother of the sleepless child, something that I have wondered before—when Sisyphus reached the top of the hill, was there someone for him to see? Was there a stolen touch before he found himself again at the bottom of the hill with the stone to push? Did he smile to himself as he set, again, to rolling it?
    I’ve never written a song, but I have started a poem before, one I could not finish. It was for Ky, and it began:
     
    I climb into the dark for you
    Are you waiting in the stars for me?
     
    “Here,” I say, and I pull a charred stick from my sleeve and a paper from my wrist.
    I write carefully. No words have ever come to me so easily, but I can’t make a mistake in writing them out or I’ll have to go back to the Archivists for more paper. And I have the poem all in my head, right now, so I write quickly for fear that I might lose some of it.
    I always thought my first finished poem would be for Ky. But this seems right. This poem is between the two of us, but also for others. It is about all the places you find someone you love.
     
    Newrose, oldrose, Queen Anne’s lace.
    Water, river, stone, and sun.
     
    Wind over hill, under tree.
    Past the border none can see.
     
    Climbing into dark for you
    Will you wait in stars for me?
     
    I have turned one of the beginnings I wrote for Ky into an ending. I have